As I’ve been doomscrolling on TikTok this term, my feed seems to have been dominated by university related videos.
Either the algorithm thinks I’m a fresher or that I’m a HE policy wonk (it’s probably the latter).
The videos that keep appearing are either fun trends from universities and students’ unions, or something a bit more worrying. There’s been an influx of students posting that they haven’t found any friends yet and are fearing that they will drop out.
These videos include text like “day 2 at uni no friends,” “walked 10 miles alone just to not be alone in my room,” “being at uni for a month having made no friends and haven’t been out once” and “freshers please hmu my flatmates don’t leave their rooms.”
A few weeks ago, one addition to my feed was:
I genuinely think I’m having the worst experience ever…I wanted to go to the freshers fayre and had no one to go with.
And it’s not just TikTok – a quick scroll of a few online threads about university (not the most sophisticated social listening, but go with me) speak of students feeling lonely, not knowing how to make friends with responses telling them to stick it out until Christmas and the original author saying “being here just feels so wrong.”
Over the past few years there’s been a shift towards more inclusive and accessible induction activities, more realistic expectation setting, renaming freshers to welcome and a more non-drinking socials, so it begs the question – what is stopping students from making friends?
Back to the drawing board
What’s striking about these TikToks and Reddit threads is that they’re essentially public cries for help – and they get thousands of likes and hundreds of responses.
The public tries to alleviate some of their anxieties in the comments – “you do make friends, give it time, 2 days is not enough to build connections,” “go to stuff on your own” and “join societies, your friends don’t have to be ur flat mates.” Solid but not groundbreaking advice.
You hope that students take this advice and run with it – but it’s not the advice that’s particularly interesting, it’s the method of communication. Students are reaching out to the void asking for either help or some validation that they’re not feeling this alone.
It says something about student confidence levels to engage in social activities, however accessible they are designed. It poses an opportunity to integrate social activities into pedagogy and into the classroom, if they’re less confident in engaging in the extra-curricular. It also reminds us that horizontal communication (student-student) seems to be more effective.
I’m a people person
This summer I spent the best part of 12 weeks of training student leaders across the country. In the first exercise I ask officers to draw out each others’ student journey. After presenting back I asked them all:
…when things were going well for you during your student experience, what was it that made it good?
After the third or fourth training session I got pretty good at predicting what they would say and 90 per cent of the time the answer was “friends.”
It was friendships that made the difference – those that were there to support them when things were tough or made the good times even better. It wasn’t the lecture content or that field trip or academic support – although many had ideas on how to make these things better – it was people.
This year’s student leaders are not naive. They’d go into detail about the different barriers to engagement, for many it’s about increased costs, time poverty (often spent working), increases in commuting but also homesickness and a lack of confidence to engage.
These are new phenomena but often their biggest reflection was they wished staff understood the realities of the pressures on students, even if they couldn’t adapt their offer.
They wouldn’t always see the university as having a responsibility to present opportunities for students to make friends – but when presented with B3 data, their access and participation plan and their university’s strategy that said something on belonging, they changed their tune.
What students say
But these student leader reflections only tell part of the story. To really understand the scale and texture of student loneliness, you need to read what students are posting when they think university staff aren’t watching.
We’ve spent some time trawling through Reddit and The Student Room – and the posts are miserable. Not dramatic-devastating, but quietly, persistently crushing in their ordinariness. Student after student describing identical patterns of isolation, often in eerily similar language.
When halls don’t help
We design halls around the assumption that proximity creates friendship. Stick students in the same building, give them a shared kitchen, and community will naturally emerge. Except it doesn’t.
One student writes:
…my flatmates don’t use the kitchen at all, except for the fridge and the oven occasionally… i’m just terribly lonely and in the past two weeks i haven’t had a single conversation with any of my flatmates.
Another echoes:
Who do you eat with? No one. With who do you socialise? No one. My flatmates… eat in their rooms and never hang out in the kitchen.
The pattern repeats across dozens of posts. En-suite rooms plus food delivery apps equals what students call “dead kitchens” – empty communal spaces that mock the idea of community. One thread about this phenomenon attracted hundreds of responses, with students confirming that the only things living in their kitchens are unopened spice racks.
The emotional toll is immediate. A first-year Australian student (though the experience mirrors UK students exactly) wrote:
I am in my first year of uni and basically know no one here and have not made any friends so far. I feel awkward and don’t know what to do in between classes so I usually end up sitting in the library by myself and studying. I’m at the point where I’m even too nervous to go and get food by myself despite being on campus for 8 hours, so I am not eating.
Students are going hungry because eating alone feels too exposing.
The commuter trap
If halls students struggle, commuters face something worse – they’re missing the infrastructure entirely. One student explains:
It’s isolating because you’re missing out on the little spontaneous moments like going to your friends place at 12am to just talk… I commuted for a year and it made me depressed.
Another captured the structural impossibility:
I just feel so left out… i wasn’t able to move out like i wished… i feel im missing out on being with my friends and being able to have the uni experience.
A 19-year-old architecture student who commutes shared a particularly harrowing story about being excluded from their course group:
When we all met in person, most of them excluded a few of us. I ended up in a smaller friend group, but I was always the one left out. I wasn’t ‘interesting’ enough, and being a commuter meant I couldn’t stay late or go out spontaneously.
They added:
I feel like a failure. I hate that this is upsetting my parents too—I know they’re proud of me, and I really want to make them happy. But I’m just so drained.
The sense of failure is echoed by another commuter who chose to live at home:
I decided to live at home during first year since I stayed in my home town but I’ve really struggled to make friends. I joined some sport societies but there were v few 1st years there and the other people already sort of have friends (those in older years) so it’s hard to get integrated in a group. I really don’t know my course mates very well due to everything being mostly online this year so it’s just been hard to meet people and click with them. I guess not being in halls has prevented me from meeting people… I just don’t really know what to do and I’m feeling quite lonely and like a failure for not having friend. Just sort of ruins your mood.
The practical barriers compound. As one student put it:
Commuting to uni can be lonely… there aren’t many social spaces, only study spaces… lectures end and ninety-five per cent leave in two minutes.
No lockers, no warm spaces to linger, no time between the last train home and the evening social. HE has built an offer that excludes by timetable.
Class, culture and not fitting the script
Identity matters in ways universities don’t always acknowledge. A student from a deprived area wrote:
i’m from a deprived area… there’s a lot of drug/drink culture at my uni… sometimes I feel like a weirdo for it.
Another added:
The majority of people who attend university are wild and very cliquey… It’s a very lonely experience unless you are into partying.
For international students, the cultural friction is sharper:
I moved to england 3 months ago… it’s just starting to hit me that i really am alone… my flatmates… need to drink and party like they need oxygen… lonely isn’t the word to describe how i feel.
These aren’t just about personal preference – they’re about economic and cultural scripts that determine who feels they belong and who doesn’t.
“Join societies” doesn’t always work
The default advice. Can’t make friends? Join a society. And for some students, it works. But scroll through enough posts and you’ll see why it fails for many others.
One student writes:
Societies… aren’t what I expected… it feels so awkward… they’re already in groups.
A third year adds:
I’m a third year, still have no friends… the societies i tried were cliquey… seeing people with their groups on campus or on instagram stories… it’s so shit.
The cost barrier is real too. While one student counsels:
My advice is don’t do anything you don’t wanna do to try and make friends… be you and do what you want to do.
Another counters the practical reality – joining multiple societies to increase your odds gets expensive fast when you don’t yet know if you’ll click with anyone.
The timing trap
Multiple students describe a narrow window for friendship formation, after which groups solidify and become hard to penetrate. A first-year, just a month in, writes:
Hi everyone I feel so lonely I have been here nealy 4 weeks but havent found people who I click with it feels like I’m so different to everyone else here… everyone has already made their friends circle and I have no friends.
The summer break breaks weak ties:
Lonely as a third year… I struggle a lot with friendships… in first year I made some friends… after summer no one talked to me or reached out.
And by third year, it can feel like starting over without any scaffolding:
im a third year, still have no friends… the societies i tried were cliquey… seeing people with their groups on campus or on instagram stories… it’s so shit.
One student captured the arbitrary nature of it:
A huge part of it is also luck… I happened to be in a flat with really nice people… other flats had antisocial or downright horrible people.
The mental health spiral
Loneliness and mental health loop into each other. One student writes:
I’m struggling with depression… my flatmates don’t talk to each other… everyone has got their own groups… I just feel like an Outsider.
Another describes the avoidance cycle:
I haven’t been able to make friends… I live in halls… never went to lectures due to paranoia, anxiety and depression… haven’t gone to society events because I haven’t got anyone to go with.
A first-year in London shared:
I have no idea when this happened but clearly I missed the memo lol. I am lagging in my studies, sometime I feel so down and anxious that I spend the entire day in the dark in bed because I have no motivation to attend lectures. I want to go out and club like other first years but I don’t really have anyone to go with.
A 21-year-old woman in her second year described the visibility of her isolation:
I’m 21 (female) and have no friends (I know how pathetic that sounds). I’m in my second year at uni and it’s so miserable having to attend lectures and seminars alone, it feels like it must be really obvious to other people how alone I am and it’s embarrassing. I have tried hard to connect with others but I have terrible social anxiety, making it pretty difficult, and the people I have spoken with/met online always seem to get bored with me very quickly.
A student battling severe anxiety captured the intersection of mental health and neurodivergence:
I’m lonely, have social anxiety, might have autism, low mood, low confidence & self esteem, no motivation for careers, seeing people live their best lives while I’m at my lowest, and I’m not sure why I’m carrying on anymore, it feels pointless. I feel like I’m invisible, on the sidelines, I don’t even feel like I belong here.
For neurodivergent students, the executive function required to keep trying when effort isn’t reciprocated becomes an additional barrier. Students explicitly describe what researchers call “avoidance loops” – missing events because they have no one to go with, which means they can’t meet anyone, which means they keep missing events. The spiral tightens.
The loneliness of having “friends”
Perhaps most insidious is a different kind of loneliness – the kind where you technically have friends but still feel fundamentally alone. A student described this six months into university:
I settled into uni well, I made a nice group of friends that I’m living with next year. It’s just 6 months in I’ve realised I’m not really that happy? I feel like I’m not really that similar to my two best friends here – and not in a good way. I just don’t really know what to do because it’s not like I can just drop them and make new friends? I feel like I just rushed into getting close with people so I wouldn’t be alone but I feel lonely anyway because I don’t feel like they really get me?
This reflects something universities rarely measure – not just whether students have friends, but whether those friendships meet their actual needs. When students settle for proximity over genuine connection because the window for making friends feels so narrow, they end up locked into relationships that don’t sustain them.
What’s also striking is how students describe the everyday humiliations of trying and failing:
I even had free cinema tickets at one point and couldn’t even find anyone to go to the cinema with me for free lol. It’s making me feel really bad about myself and Im starting to feel as if there’s something wrong with me.
Another:
I came to uni thinking I would find people I could vibe with and chill with… I know I’m partially to blame because I’m also a naturally quiet and shy person but I feel like everyone has found their groups and it’s only November still the first term of uni and I’m just on my own… when I try to talk to people it feels like I’m begging it and not authentic.
A second-year wrote:
I have hundreds of acquaintances, but non of those i can call ‘friends’. When im not in uni, i spend the majority of my time alone, do things alone, go shopping alone, go to the cinema alone – all this to try and make me feel better, but just confirms my suspicions of being depressed, lonely and without any friends. I ******* hate it!
And perhaps most painful – the contrast between the public and private self:
I could literally cry bc I am so bored and lonely. Completely friendless… I just feel so emotionally alone and non existent when I am in university. Outside of university with my family it is positive attitudes and happy happy. But I don’t want to put up a facade that everything is peaches and cream when in uni because it is not.
One student who failed their first year explained:
I flopped, and I flopped bad. I failed 3 modules… The reason I flopped was…and I hate to openly say this but I was in a stage of manic depression; I’d lost all my friends from back home and I didn’t get on with my flatmates. They found me weird and geeky (which I am) I was very lonely throughout most of uni, had no friends… I flopped my exams because I had no motivation at life.
What all of this adds up to
Strip away the platitudes and a pattern emerges – in a mass system, students aren’t failing at friendship, the system is failing at social architecture.
En-suite accommodation means students rarely bump into each other, food delivery apps mean kitchens stay empty, and mismatched timetables mean flatmates never overlap. Mass lectures that empty immediately don’t build connections, and when only one or two academics know a student’s name, academic spaces aren’t doing the social work we assume they are.
Commuters can’t access evening socials due to travel costs and last trains, and they have nowhere to linger between classes with no warm spaces and no lockers. The default social offer remains alcohol-focused, excluding non-drinkers, international students unfamiliar with UK drinking culture, students from lower-income backgrounds, and those with anxiety or neurodivergence who find the format inaccessible.
Friendships form early and groups solidify fast – often within the first few weeks. Students arriving late or missing that window describe groups as impenetrable by November, summer breaks dissolve weak ties, and third years start again without halls to facilitate contact. And even when students make friends, they often describe them as superficial, settling for proximity because the window for genuine connection felt too narrow.
It’s a bit risky
Over the summer with student leaders, a follow up activity that Jim and I deployed involved some student leaders coming up with a risk register for the student experience and then some mitigations. Some of their interventions about loneliness (modelled without funding or capacity constraints) are insightful and offer some food for thought:
- More dedicated space for students to “exist” including communal lounges, lockers, microwaves and study space
- Accessibility guides to rooms and spaces, pictures of what activities, seminar rooms and office hours might look like to set expectations and build confidence
- Opportunities to chat, talk to other students and build connection built into the curriculum – through seminar activities, assessment or group projects
- Comprehensive peer mentoring and buddy schemes that support students through their first few weeks
- Longer processes of induction
- Deliberately generating groupwork and discussion in the first teaching episodes of a module
Some of this isn’t new and might be things that already take place on various campuses. But it’s becoming clear that without curated and designated interventions on student loneliness from student unions and their universities, one of the core parts of the student experience risks becoming a luxury good for a select few.
And as money gets tighter and different parts of the student experience get shaved off, that might look like the social event the department runs with free pizza disappears or it could be bigger class sizes – either way the ability to form connections gets harder. Connection, belonging and mattering don’t always require vast funds, but they do reap huge rewards.
Each cut makes forming friendships harder. Connection and belonging don’t always require huge budgets, but they do require intention. Notably, few interventions that remain focus specifically on helping students meet each other, despite this cutting across multiple institutional KPIs.
If accommodation kitchens are dead, they can be made alive through regular subsidised socials and RA-hosted drop-ins. Commuters need staffed spaces with lockers and microwaves, clustered timetables, travel bursaries, and social calendars starting at 12:15 not 19:15. Social contact needs embedding in teaching through discussion, assessed group work, and academics knowing students’ names.
The societies model needs fixing – month-one free trials to reduce experimentation costs, incentivising daytime and sober formats, normalising Week 5 sign-ups as much as Week 1, running “come alone” events. Addressing class and cultural barriers can be done through multiple entry points that don’t require drinking culture or cultural capital. Neurodivergent students need clear guides and structured formats. International students need mixed-group activities with staff introductions in weeks 2 and 6, not just induction.
Funding this infrastructure properly isn’t expensive – and anyway, pizza socials and welcome events aren’t frivolous extras, they’re the scaffolding for measured outcomes. Engineer repeated face-to-face contact and friendships follow.
There’s something else worth paying attention to, and it’s hiding in plain sight across Europe. In most countries we’ve visited on our Study Tours, universities allocate every new student to small groups of 5-15 with trained student mentors before they arrive. It’s universal, not optional or targeted at “at risk” groups. These second or third-year mentors guide groups through first term – campus tours, city exploration, and crucially, turning up to things together.
When UK students explain why they didn’t engage in extracurricular activities, one answer dominates: “I had nobody to go with.” Universal mentoring solves this by design. Research shows these schemes improve retention, belonging and mental health, particularly for first-generation and international students. Aalto University credits their tutoring system for creating “the world’s best student experience.”
UK universities run scattered peer mentoring – something for international students, maybe medical school family groups – but lack scale and universality. European universities assume all students need this and design accordingly. These schemes are student-led and union-coordinated, with training and modest payment or academic credit for mentors. Improved retention alone pays for the programme many times over.
Whose job?
Some will get this far and ask why universities should be responsible for students making friends. Surely that’s not what academics signed up for – shouldn’t institutions focus on teaching and research rather than playing social coordinator?
The problem is that Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t work the way we’d like it to. Students who are lonely, anxious, and socially isolated aren’t engaging with the academic self-actualisation at the top of Maslow’s pyramid – they’re stuck further down, and no amount of excellent lecture content will shift them up.
The student who posted about being too anxious to get food after eight hours on campus isn’t thinking about their essay – they’re hungry and scared. The one spending entire days in bed in the dark isn’t going to benefit from better seminar slides.
Universities can either acknowledge that belonging and connection are prerequisites for academic success, or they can keep measuring poor outcomes and wondering why interventions aimed at the top of Maslow’s pyramid aren’t working.
And given that students are now paying the full cost of their education through a lifetime of additional tax framed as debt, universities can’t simply say “that’s not our problem” when the system they’ve designed produces loneliness at scale.
Students seem remarkably willing to accept this as a collective responsibility – they generally don’t complain about resources spent on mental health support or on helping others succeed, even when they don’t use those services themselves.
What breaks that tolerance is visible unfairness and institutional indifference. If universities want to retain that goodwill and actually deliver on the outcomes they’re being measured against, designing for friendship isn’t mission creep – it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.
